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Zev Radovan/www.biblelandpictures.com

A reexamination of the famous Mesha Stela, discovered in Transjordan in 1868, revealed that King Mesha of Moab had used the same phrase to refer to the kingdom of Judah in his inscription. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the minimalists refused to accept either identification, claiming that bytdwd referred to a specific place (akin to bytlhm for Bethlehem) rather than the ancestral dynasty of David.